At the end of June, a
series of court-martials took place at the Jaffa Military Court inTel Aviv-Jaffa.

Jonathan Ben-Artzi's
(ISR12371) court-martial resumed on 23 June, after the Surpeme Court
decided that he can be tried in a military court. Gush Shalom reports on
the hearing:

"As the court
martial of Yoni Ben-Artzi resumes, a disappointment: two intriguing
witnesses who were expected, didn't show up. Colonel Shlomi Simchi -
head of the army's Conscience Committee, which persistently refused to
recognize Ben Artzi as a
pacifist - was "too busy" and would come on a different
occasion. The same with Brigadier Avi Zamir, Deputy Head of Manpower,
who had tried to negotiate with Ben-Artzi on "easy terms of
service" and when that failed ordered Ben-Artzi court-martialed.

The first witness who
appears: Ruti Ben-Artzi, sister of the accused, who came over from
Columbia University in the US where she is completing a PhD. in
Political Science. "I am twelve years the elder; I know Yoni since
I helped change his diapers and have followed closely his development.
Already in the highschool he objected to lectures by officers who came
to the school to prepare children for military service. Nor did he want
to take part in school outings to the Mount Herzl National Cemetery and
the like. And I witnessed myself how deeply he was moved when the family
visited Verdun, France and saw these terrible cemeteries with hundreds
of thousands of mostly anonymous tombstones. 'How futile, the Germans
and French killing each other, and now they use both the same currency.'
I see it that he came back from France a determined pacifist"

The prosecutor his
cross-examination tries to trip her up on many minor details. "Is
it not true that your father described this a bit different, three years
ago in a newspaper interview? And how come your grandfather thinks maybe
just afraid?" (The extremely heterogeneous Ben-Artzi family is much
sought-after by the press.)

Then, Yoni Yechezkel -
a refuser who shared prison terms with his namesake and who last week
got a sudden and unexpected discharge from the Conscience Committee (the
first applicant to gain an exemption since the committee was formed in
1995). The questions of Adv. Michael Sfard reveal a refusnik of quite
different style, a bit flippant one who frequently went AWOL, played a
kind of cat and mouse game with the military authorities and had been
quite frankly willing to make all kind of compromises ("I told the
army I don't care what way they get me out, Conscience Committee,
Incompatibility Committee, psychiatrist - whatever they choose, but they
will never make a soldier out of me").

Also Yechezkel was
cross-examined, and the prosecutor - who tries so assiduouslyto disprove Ben Artzi's pacifist credentials - was now in the
opposite role of bolstering Yechezkel's. But he was unconvincing in
trying to show that Yechezkel is more of a pacifist than the punctual
and principled Ben Artzi."

All five had their
court-martial session on 24 June. Again, from a report distributed by
Gush Shalom:

"For a whole hour,
before the scheduled time of today's trial, dozens of youths lined the
sidewalk in front of the building, holding up placardsand chanting
"Occupation is Terrorism! - The refuser is a hero!"Long before
the judges came in, the small courtroom was filled far beyond capacity
with many envious activists left outside. In the front row were sitting
Knesset Members Roman Bronfman (Meretz) and Muhammad Barake (Hadash
communists) as well as former KM Tamar Gozanski. When the five accused
filed in, they were greeted with prolonged applause.

Adv. Dov Henin started
by outlining the main defence line. "This trial is not about
technicalities and obscure points of the law. This trial is about a
major constitutional issue which no Israeli court has dealt with before.
The conscience is the most basic part of human dignity, the part of the
personality which defines the essential values; the part which if
broken, breaks the whole person. It is the contention of the defence in
this trial that Freedom of Conscience is already enshrined in israeli
law and has been for the last ten years, ever since the Knesset adopted
the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty - even though the military
authorities so far did not take proper cognizance of the fact. The
defence asks the court's indulgence in listening to the five accused.
Each one should have the full possibility of showing that his decision
to refuse military service does indeed proceed from deeply held
convictions - the dictates of his conscience."

The first to take the
stand is CO Haggai Matar. He speaks out of his already considerable
personal experience with the occupation, to which he adds long quotes
from the reports of human rights organizations as well as stories which
he heard from military prison cell-mates who have been to the
territories.

"In 1999, I joined
a special of joint summer studies by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian
pupils. Soon afterwards I started correspondence with a Palestinian
Administrative Detainee who was held in an Israeli prison for six years
without trial. When at last he was released I visited him in a house
riddled by Israeli bullets and with broken furniture.

I joined actions of the
Gush Shalom and Ta'ayush movements. We went to the territories to
rebuild houses demolishedby
the army, to provide humanitarian help in towns hit by closure or
curfew, to support Palestinian villagers who have been violently
assaulted by settlers. Always, soldiers tried to block us and in many
cases used violence against us.

In 2001, I met again
with some of the Palestinian pupils of the summer camp and they told
harrowing stories of being beaten up and arrested by soldiers. One told
of witnessing his friends in Ramallah being shot to death.

On August 20, 2002,
three days before I was due to present myself for enlistment, I and
several other activists got an emergency call to go to Yanoun Village, a
tiny place where settlers have so terrorized the inhabitants that the
Palestinians all left. We came there and the empty houses were terribly
depressing and somber sights. We were very happy that due to our
presence the people started coming back.

With all my
experiences, I had no doubt: I absolutely don't want to be and can't be
part of the Israeli army which I don't think has any longer the right to
call itself an army of defence."

[The above is excerpted
from a two-hour speech; full text in Hebrew and English available from
Anat Matar <matar@post.tau.ac.il>]

The philosophical
analysis ofCO Matan
Kaminer, next in line, was no less impassioned.

"In this testimony
I would like to describe the guiding lines of my conscience and explain
why it is incompatible with service in today's Israeli army. For some
people the basic value from which their conscience is derived is God's
word. For others it is loyalty to their country. For me the basic value
is human liberty, human rights. I believe that all human beings have
inalienable rights such as the right to life, the right to equality, to
welfare, to education, to association, to democracy. All of these rights
are violated in countless ways by the occupation - mainly violated as
regards the Palestinians, but in many ways also regarding Israelis.

The right of
Palestinians to life is violated by the policy of liquidations (which
indirectly causes also the loss of Israeli life, as we saw last week),
and by the constant military activity in populated areas which causes
the death and wounding of civilians.

The right to equality,
both of Palestinians and of Israelis living within the Green line is
violated by the policy of settlement which takes land, resources and
basic human dignity from Palestinians and which discriminates against
most israelis in the division of national resources.

The right of
Palestinians to welfareand
to education are violated by the ongoing closures and curfews which
cause the sky-rocketing unemployment figures and the severe disruption
of the educational system.

The most fundamental,
though not necessarily the most directly painful, is the violation of
the right to live in democracy. The very rule over another people which
is denied the right to control it's own life and future is a flagrant
violation of that right, and after 36 years the pretense that the
occupation is temporary wears thin. The contempt for democracy is
gradually crossing into Israel proper, with racist extreme right parties
becoming an acceptable and common component of government coalitions.

The deprivation to the
right of democracy of the Palestinians is the root cause of all the
crimes which accompany the occupation - both the crimes of the occupier
of which I described part, and the crimes of the occupied, pushed to
immoral and inhuman ways of struggle. Neither set of crimes is in any
way justified. Both are direct derivatives of the occupation and can
only be abolished by the occupation itself.

From all of this, it
logically follows that service in the army, which is the main instrument
for implementing the occupation is totally against my conscience. My
decision to refuse enlistment does not mean that I am against the state
of Israel, against the people in Israel, or against the Israeli society
of which I am part. On the contrary, I feel impelled to do all i can for
the Israeli society. I did it in the past and intend to go on doing it.
The occupation is a terrible crime; an immoral and malignant crime
against another society which spreads also to our own society,
strangling and poisoning it.

Obviously, in such a
situation I can't go into the army. I can only ask that my conscience be
recognized and that i be provided an opportunity to do alternative
civilian service for the benefit of the Israeli society.

At three in the
afternoon it was the turn of Shimri Tzameret, whose testimony was
interrupted by the court adjourning at 5 pm.

"Already
for years I know that i am not going to join the army. I know it with as
much certainty as I know that I will never kick a homeless person lying
on the sidewalk, never rape a woman, and when I will have a child -
never abandon it. We all of us have our own reasonings and my
reasons are a bit different from those who spoke before me. I feel that
there is no need to detail what the occupation is doing to the
Palestinians. What it is doing to ourselves is reason enough.

First I want to talk
about the suicide bombings. It is a very central part of our life here
in this country and many of us are touched personally in one way or
another. It happened a bit more than a year ago, exactly on the day when
I decided to tell my schoolmates that i am going to refuse to serve in
the army, that a suicide bombing happened in which the mother of one of
the girls in the school was killed. And later on the day it turned out
that her sister was killed as well.

It brought home to me
what does it mean, that the life of this girl whom I knew will never be
the same again; how terrible it is when something like this is suddenly
breaking in to a life. Some of my schoolmates were angry with me; they
said: how can you refuse to go to the army when such things happen. I
told them: that is exactly the reason that I am refusing: the army being
in the territories is not a way to stop terrorist attacks; it causes
them. Exactly because I told Merav that I feel committed to do whatever
I can to prevent such things from happening again to others, I feel that
one of the most important things which I as an individual can do, is
refusing to serve in the army.

After all, everybody
knows how the present situation will end: always in the last centuries
the rebellion of an occupied people eventually ended in its freedom. The
only question how much time it will take, and how many more casualties
there will be. I try to make both a bit less.

Another point: what the
occupation is doing to our society. I want to tell about Rami, whom i
met in the prison. I sat with him for hours, listening. It is incredible
how many terrible things he had witnessed in just three months of
service in the territories. He told me about the young boy who threw a
stone at the lieutenant-colonel's jeep which did not hit but the colonel
still chased the child, caught him and beat him brutally with the butt
of a rifle. And another child which a Shabak agent tied up, and then
urinated on him. When Rami tried to protest the man shouted: go away; I
am conducting an interrogation. And he also told me soldiers looting a
shop, and then destroying everything which they could not carry. And he
told me about how he could not stand it anymore, and how he sat in the
toilet for several hours in the night, the barrel in his mouth, the
finger on the trigger. In the end he ran away, and that's how he got
into prison. That's what happens to the sensitive people. The
non-sensitive ones, those who get used to these Wild West norms,
afterwards bring these norms into the Israeli society itself. We are
corrupting ourselves. I am not willing to be part of the main instrument
of corruption."

[To be continued in the
next session some time in July, when also Noam Bahat and Adam Maor will
have "their day in court."]"

Hillel Goral's
(ISR12841) court-martial session took place on 25 June. His case is
separated from the trial of the other five, and he is charged with
desertion. We don't yet know what happened at his court-martial session,
but hope to be able to give you an update soon. Unlike the others, who
are confijned to base, Hillel Goral is imprisoned

Military Prison No 4,
Hillel Goral, Mil ID 7269230, Military Postal Number 02507, IDF, IsraelOTHER CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS IN PRISON:
Amit Grossman (ISR12072) was sentenced to 28 days in prison for refusing
to serve in the Occupied Territories on 15 June 2003. He is due to be
released on 13 July.

Salman Salameh
(ISR12602), a Druze conscientious objector, has been in and out of
prison for the last two years. He was again caught on 4 May 2003, and is
presently in prison awaiting trial on charges of desertion.

Salman Salameh,
Military Prison No 4, Military Postal Number 02507, IDF, IsraelYoel
Perlman (ISR13225) was sentenced to 28 days in prison on 9 June 2003. He
is due out on 13 July 2003.

Yoel Perlman, Military
Prison No 4, Military Postal Number 02507, IDF, IsraelB.S.
(ISR13526) is a Jehovah's Witness CO, and has been in prison for about
six months now (in and out - the usual repeated sentences). Usually,
Jehovah's Witnesses get exempted from military service when they provide
a letter that clearly states that they are a member of the Jehovah's
Witnesses. B.S. says he has done so, but still didn't get exempted.

War Resisters'
International calls for letters of support to all imprisoned
conscientious objectors. Please write to those in prison in Israel now.

War Resisters'
International calls for letters of protest to Israeli authorities, and
Israeli embassies abroad.An email
letter can be sent at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20030703a.html.War Resisters' International calls for the
immediate release of all imprisonedconscientious objectors.

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